[THIS IS THE SECOND PART OF A HEARTS OF IRON IV REVIEW ON STEAM - http://steamcommunity.com/id/nuttex/recommended/394360]

The way it works right now, resistance fighters might as well be some weird variant of aqua regia that gets sprinkled by local population on all buildings around them to make them dissolve over the course of a few months. Because aside from this, there is no resistance whatsoever. Capitulate USSR, leave no police units there whatsoever for the next 10 years and virtually no one will try to revolt because there is no one to revolt in the first place.

The battle plan system is good on paper, but in practice the braindead AI works against you. They will constantly leave gaps in your frontlines, move divisions along the frontline whether that’s needed or not thus losing any entrenchment bonuses, etc. If you’re up against someone who micros their divisions a lot, you’re dead. Fallback lines are pretty lacklustre if somewhat serviceable - the AI will constantly put 10 divisions into a single spot and 1 right next to that stack. This issue is common for regular frontlines as well. The only solution to this is to assign frontlines to make sure your divisions follow your advances and then micro every division to ensure they don’t do something dumb that will cost you an army or two.

And then there are bugs and exploits. With every patch, Paradox make one step forward and a million steps back. Remember that sweet hotjoin feature they introduced in 1.2? Should anyone hotjoin, the command console gets enabled. Should you resync the game if someone desyncs, the same happens. 1.3 is supposed to fix the infamous phantom/shadow factory bug that allows one to simply have thousands of factories with a minute or two with no way of spotting this unless you look at their imports, check the save for a requested_factories line or load up the save to see a dozen empty production lines that are needed to fix this. This bug has been known since the launch and has been reported for months on end to Paradox and yet they either didn’t acknowledge it as being possible or simply ignored the issue altogether. It took people leaking this publically to as many people as possible via [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/hoi4/comments/58i6lw/phantom_factory_glitch_that_is_likely_to_kill_off/]Plebbit[/url] to actually get the devs to fix this issue. There is a few dozen issues like this right now that allows one to get an upper hand in multiplayer such as: halting the enemy navy in a dumb one sub battle to negate their total naval supremacy, blocking any and all naval invasions by having a swarm of one sub fleets in all sea provinces because fleets will take a billion years to take them out, starting invasions of hostile lands with your volunteers because your officially neutral fleets are not at war with the enemy but still provide supremacy, etc. The list just goes on and on and the devs either ignore the issues or take months to fix them. Things like that hotjoin/resync but are simply unacceptable if you want to have a healthy multiplayer community, and considering that it provides the only value there is to HoI IV right now, it needs their attention ASAP.